Travels, travails, and stories in Korea and elsewhere — "Been inclined to wander / Off the beaten track …. I've held my licence / It came with birth / For self reliance on this earth" – Judas Priest, "Grinder"

Yes, this is what happens when you constantly hear everything you do is awesome. This is what happens when people fawn over your every Tweet and Instagram photo. This is what happens when no responsible adult has ever said the word “no,” made you change your clothes before leaving the house, or never spanked your butt for deliberate defiance.

If you ever even consider doing something like that, I promise you that I will run up and twerk so you will see how ridiculous twerking looks. I will duct tape your mouth shut so your tongue doesn’t hang out like an overheated hound dog. I will smack any male whom you decide to smash against his pelvis – after I first knock you on your butt for forgetting how a lady acts in public.

Quality read. I’d finished this a while ago and hadn’t gotten around to posting about it yet.

Glad I read it in Korea. The six killer apps are indeed insightful for explaining why the West succeeded over the Rest.

One point stuck out: Japan copied everything Western in the 1800s and Korea’s doing much the same thing now. Koreans work like Americans and buy like 3 Americas. They work hard, they drink hard, they build, they build, and build some more.

Every morning* I wake up starving. Starving to not only eat something, but to do something, go somewhere, or otherwise kick some ass. If it’s a weekday I want to get into the classroom and have fun with the kids. If it’s a weekend, I want to go out there and get stuff done. The sun is up and the day has just begun. I’ve already eaten and am making the plans for the day. Normally I’d be with Lady Buckeye, but she’s on a business trip until Monday. She’s moving to my province and thus needed to attend an orientation….not that that would change the basic outline of the morning: Wake up, eat, drink coffee, read emails and blog posts, and get moving. Staying in bed has never been for me anyway.

Some of us can go without breakfast or shun it altogether, but not me. Having some food in the stomach helps get the gears turning and squelches the rumbles in the stomach. While The Red Pill Journal said “Forget to eat once in a while,” skipping breakfast for any reason has always led to fatigue in my case. Thanks to the early start yesterday morning with helping Lady Buckeye to her destination, breakfast didn’t happen. The energy was needed, though. Oh well, to each his own on that one.

It’s Sunday morning right now and unlike many others my age, no hangovers are dragging this man down. I pity those whose who wake up with their head on fire and curse the daylight; I was once among them. Not anymore. The time’s too valuable to waste on things that can be avoided. Judas Priest had it right:

If you think I’ll sit around as the world goes by
You’re thinking like a fool because it’s a case of do or die
— “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin'” [Screaming for Vengeance, 1982]

Dale Carnegie wrote about making a plan for every hour of the day.** While I’ve never made that detailed of a plan for the day, his point was to actively think about what you will accomplish in the 24 hours we all have. Having a plan means a concrete list of tasks to do or things to complete. It is the cure for bumbling about the day and doing nothing. So no, I’m not sitting around today. By sundown, I will have:

Revised the HS lesson plans for the weekWorked on the HS semester outline
Played at least 3 albums of tunes – Got 2.5 in.

Taken a walk and a bike ride

Played the guitar
Drafted something for the blogCompleted other household tasks.

And frankly, more will happen. I would have met a friend or two today, but everyone appears to be either out of town or busy. It happens. I’m good on my own. A man’s gotta keep moving. Rock on…

*Yeah, I’m a morning guy now. Teaching and realizing that partying until dawn means the next day is shot will do that to you.

** From How to Start Worrying and Start Living.

This morning’s rock and roll:

A smoking live take from 1983. The whole concert comes as a bonus DVD on the 30th Anniversary Edition of Screaminf for Vengeance.

Motörhead’s “Another Perfect Day.” The title track from the album of theirs that I play the most.

It has happened. Until yesterday, it was me and a grandma in South Jeolla who didn’t have a smart phone. I now have a Samsung Galaxy phone and can read stuff or play games anywhere at any time. The freedom to walk like a zombie has arrived.The students and staff of the school will surely notice something’s up.

Within 12 hours of ownership, I’ve already read in bed with it. Normally, I read stuff on the iPad, but the phone is easier to hold than the iPad.

A gracious coteacher brokered exchange of the phones at the local SK store. The exchange took around 90 minutes. It took longer than all three of us has imagined, but given that there were foreigners involved, things had to be sent in and approved. We should be lucky the phone exchange worked as well as it did, since the guy originally said it would take a week for everything to switch over. After some more of the paperwork, he changed that time to one day. We liked one day better. But just as we were making plans to regroup on the morrow, he said something like, “Screw it, the company won’t like this, but we can change the phones now.” And good for that. He was probably stretching the truth, but maybe he thought that the weeklong wait would make us have second thoughts and that we’d take our business elsewhere? A better reason has to do with being with two attractive women. Maybe he did it because he liked my friend’s brown eyes? I’d read of the “blue-eyed special” before; being an attractive female has its advantages.

As an added bonus, the old phone got switched over to “prepay” status, which benefited my friend because she’s going to do a little sightseeing around Korea before she flies out. Woohoo.

Some people are leaving town this week because their contracts are finish. With their departures comes a spate of stuff to sell or give away. One such thing is a neighbor’s smart phone. I’ve never had one before. I’d planned on delaying getting a smart phone for as long as possible because for all their positive features, they tend to turn people (esp those in Korea) into zombies who can’t take their eyes off the touchscreen. The phone my co-teacher help me get upon arrival may be an outmoded flipper, but it made calls and sent messages. It took pictures until the sensor broke too. It did everything a phone needs to do.

But alas, the venerable old piece of junk’s gone to shorting out and dropping calls, so this smart phone will be good. The change had to come at some point. I’ll have maps, a dictionary, and that oh so wonderful Kakaotalk app to futz with at will. The bill will go up, but at least I’ll be able to actually type things. Maybe the call quality will sound better. At any rate, I vow to keep the thing out of sight and watch baseball games while walking around.

Masturbating as thinking. Damn. Who’d have thought that at some point, we foreign English teachers would probably have to say, “This is off limits in class”?

In Charles Bukowski’s book Ham on Rye, there was a scene where a kid was spanking the monkey in class because the teacher was attractive. It was funny as hell for the time (~1930s LA), but real life stories like this one tend to be as crazy as they are funny.